“Protectionist” doctors – says chemist

In an astounding attack of hypocrisy, exceeding the previous standards of pharmacy, chemist Ash Soni of Streatham accused doctors, who claim pharmacy prescribing to be unsafe, of “protectionism”.   Quoted on dotpharmacy.com this week ( 12 October 2006 ), he apparently forgets the decades of real protectionism, which continues to this day, when chemists fought doctors tooth and nail through tribunals and the courts in determined efforts to prevent GP practices from providing medicines to their patients.  

Before the vision of cash for prescribing lit up their eyes and tills, Ash Soni and his colleagues at the Pharmaceutical Society believed that “doctors should prescribe and chemists should dispense, each to their own special area of training”.   

Not only that, they openly and loudly condemned dispensing medical practice for prescribing and dispensing being both in the same hands.  It seems that Soni and Co. believed that doctors would be tempted, if they were not actually doing so, of cheating the NHS.

Apparently all that is forgotten now that the dispensing of medicines has become a simple matter of reach and stick with safety provided by technology.   So readily forgotten that the chemist will shortly even be relinquishing that last bastion of his raison d’etre, on-site supervision, so that he may leave his shop in the hands of dispensers to act as a bare-foot doctor – or play golf.

Mind you, they still refuse to accept doctor dispensing!

But to come back to the point, is the doctor reasonable to be anxious about the safety of pharmacy prescribing?

Well, let’s look at the training the chemist will receive before he is allowed to prescribe from the whole, UK drug list.    

Just two years after qualifying as a chemist, Mr Soni will need only 26 days of training followed by another 12 days of supervised prescribing practice – by his colleagues, none of whom will be qualified doctors.

During those few weeks the chemist will have to soak up all the medical skills of the doctor.     Remember, the law refuses to allow a doctor to practice until he has qualified in the theory and practice of medicine, including of course, diagnosis, after five years at medical school, a two year foundation course and one year of registrar training.   

More years than the chemist’s weeks!

Can anybody, anybody even Mr Soni, really believe that prescribing and diagnosis from the whole British Pharmacopoeia will be safe in the hands of a chemist with less than six weeks medical training?   More to the point, will patients be safe in the hands of a prescribing chemist?

Only a crackpot, desperate government or an arrogant pharmacy profession could think that but as we have both of those, patients – BEWARE!

On the other hand, now he isn’t needed to dispense medicines, what is the purpose of the High Street chemist?